UX/UI Design

Successfully Marketing While Keeping Demographics in Mind

Marketing to customers of different demographics is simpler than it looks.

Consumer demographics are broken up into different categories: millennials, generation X, baby boomers, and the silent generation, the elderly (“15 Strategies For Marketing..”, 2015).

Understanding these various types of people and their income levels, age and ethnicity is very important to successful marketers today (Mansfield, 2014).

Millennials are a very mobile generation, and work hard to ensure that their peers are up-to-speed with each other. They may be impulsive, but are able to score great business deals when they need to. Generation X is more reserved and hard-working, and prefer to search for products carefully, and work towards applying discounts. The silent generation, who were born between mid-1920s and 1945, don’t tend to spend that much, having a traditional mentality. Besides age, these demographics are divided by gender, income, and ethnicity. Consumers who have more disposable income, or who are rich, are better targets for marketers selling clothing and accessories(“15 Strategies For Marketing..”, 2015). Understanding demographics creates successful outcomes for companies that wish to acquire long-term customers (Nelson, p. 4).

In her book, “The Transformational Consumer,” Tara Nelson talks about transactional marketing versus transformational marketing. MyFitnessPal, the world’s largest digital health company, started with a small tiny orange logo of a “tiny dancer”. It was catchy, cute, and motivational. The tiny dancer grew to a full-fledged app with 45 millions users in over 18 months, without any paid advertising (Nelson, p. 2).

What?!? How is this possible?

MyFitnessPal was smart. It didn’t work hard to acquire customers relentlessly like some marketing companies. They won over their consumers by caring about their humanity, and this was extremely influential in winning over transformational consumers, that, well, cared about being “transformational” (Nelson, p. 3).

Humanity?!? In Marketing??

This is partially because people get sick of being treated like a business transaction, and getting hassled by “tit-for-tat”, stressed-out marketers trying to reach marketing goals by buying their consumers every week, day in and out, like a bad, endless arts and crafts project (Nelson, p. 4)

Marketers finally understood that consumers were smart, instead of trying to buy them out. A picture of our victim (the average consumer) below.